Miley Cyrus hits Twitter record: 306k tweets per minute

Cyrus unseats Beyonce with new record while destroying cultural progress

So here’s a valuable life lesson for your kids: pretending to have sex on stage with a big foam “Number One” hand will make you the most popular person at the party, which will invariably lead to collaborations with Kanye West and changes to the Oxford Dictionaries Online.

True story.

That little song and dance number that we saw with Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke—you know the one I’m talking about? The one that made you want to put your head in an oven and never wake up again? Yeah, that one broke Twitter records for the most tweeted entertainment event ever, with a mind-boggling 306,100 tweets per minute.

(Btw, I love the picture above because it looks like Robin Thicke is like "I just have to sing!")

Miley Cyrus’s new Twitter record unseats Beyonce as the reigning Twitter record-holder, with 268,000 tweets per minute during her Super Bowl halftime show last year. By the end of the show, Cyrus garnered 4.5 million tweets, ranging from “I’m so uncomfortable” and “Miley Cyrus is still twerkin’ real hard to set us back 40 years” to “That was not art. That was a cry for help.”

All told, the VMAs drew 11 million visitors across its Web, social, and mobile properties—its highest one-day total ever. But the Cyrus/Thicke human rights violation was the real winner, with 10 million streams altogether. To put that into perspective, the VMAs as a whole generated 15 million streams.

On the Monday following the VMAs, MTV Mobile broke records with 2 million visitors, 6 million page views, and 1.8 million streams.

It was kind of impossible not to see the Cyrus/Thicke performance. There are over 400,000 results for “Miley Cyrus VMA Performance 2013” on YouTube (not my search terms—that’s the most common search). The top two most watched videos have a combined total of nearly 12 million views.

I couldn't watch the performance without picturing Billy Ray Cyrus and Alan Thicke sitting back and nodding their heads, saying, "Yup. We done good."

(Also added to the ODO are the words “selfie,” "phablet," and “bitcoin.” Go team nerd!)

So what have we learned from this? We’ve learned that appropriating black culture and using black people as props to be ironic because you’re actually an entitled rich white girl singing about other rich white kids partying on ecstasy is TOTALLY a valid career option.